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Monday, 4 January 2016

AlShabaab and Donald Trump – Building the Fifth Column

Al-Qaeda perceives the American political system as foundational
to its National Integrity. By assaulting it, Al-Qaeda's affiliate, Al-Shabaab,
hopes to undermine it. Remarkably, counter-terrorism analysts have also
observed that Islamists are able to achieve most of their objectives (and
goals) when the Democratic Party rules the US, as compared to administrations
led by the Republican Party. The leftist (liberal) inclination of the
Democratic Party drives Democrat-led administrations to inadvertently support
Islamist projects, especially when it sacrifices national interests on the
altar of multiculturalism and political correctness, which decrees toleration
of Islamism. On New Year day of 2016, Al-Shabaab released a video documentary
aimed at widening the racial rifts in the US, besides gaining followers among
the African-American population. Likewise, it projected Donald Trump as an
enemy of Islam, and the intention of this calculated move was to vilify the
Republican Party by casting it as an enemy of Islam; as well as stealthily
entreating American Muslims and Black Americans to vote for the Democratic
Party in the upcoming elections.

Poster of the Terror recruitment video: The Path to Paradise - Episode 2

Islamic terrorists are known to cynically
exploit existing communal grievances to further their goals and objectives.
Another matter of note is the fact that most grand strategists of Global Jihad
- including those embedded in Al-Shabaab – understand the principles of
Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) [1].
Accordingly, Al-Shabaab (HSM) uses 4GW elements to guide its multifaceted asymmetric war against the militaries and cultures, as well as
the national psyches (of the civilian population) of its adversaries. This was
evident on 1st January 2016, when Al-Shabaab - through its flagship media
outlet, Al-Kataib Foundation for Media Productions - used the media element to
fortify its asymmetric warfare capabilities [2].
Through its release entitled The Path to Paradise 2 - a sequel to an earlier video
documentary, The Path to Paradise -HSM was able to garner substantial (international) media attention, which also allowed it to dent the
public image of the Republican Party before a perplexed audience.

Purposeful Politics and
Salafi Jihadism

The consummate doctrine of Al-Shabaab mandates
that political objectives must be achieved under the cloak of religious
devoutness. Using Salafism as a vehicle to manage purposeful politics, Al-Shabaab
has been able to guide its strategic planning towards gaining religious
legitimacy and ideologically-committed recruits, in addition to mobilizing its
followers to commit their energies and resources towards achieving a set of
concrete goals. The strategists in Al-Qaeda and its offshoot, Al-Shabaab, have learnt the
art of exploiting secular politics with the intent of guiding and influencing
the native political processes towards accomplishing specific goals, including
the gradual weakening of the secular establishment, as well as the
dissemination (and entrenchment) of Jihadi-Salafi ideology within the target
population.

Remarkably,
the grand strategies employed by violent Islamists are derived from non-Islamic
sources, partly due to the inherent intellectual [3] and
social [4] inferiority of Islamic cultures. A
cursory look at their strategies shows heavy reliance on the stratagems laid
down by Yusuf al-Ayiri, Abu Bakr Naji, Abu Ubayd al-Qurashi, Abu al-Fadl and
Abu Musab al-Suri [5]. The aforementioned architects
of Global jihad, despite their ingenuity, were not wholesome original thinkers,
with their strategies closely tracking those formulated by Mao-Tse Tung, Che
Guevara, William Lind, Thomas Hammes, Thomas Barnett and Carl von Clausewitz [6].

Useful Idiot

During the Bush Administration, Jihadists
suffered significant setbacks in all their theaters of war including Somalia,
Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria, Bosnia, and Chechnya. However, under the Obama
administration, Jihadists have experienced a renaissance across the globe - to
the extent that the Islamic State has been able to carve and administer large
swathes of territories in Iraq and Syria, while its franchises in Nigeria,
Yemen, Egypt, and Libya enjoy significant military successes as gauged by their
territorial conquests. Al-Qaeda has also been able to experience
resurgence in Africa and Asia - mainly in Somalia, Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya,
Yemen, Afghanistan, Philippines, Indonesia, Syria and Pakistan. In hindsight,
both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have
benefitted tremendously from the inadequacies of the Obama administration - and
the ideologies espoused by the Democratic Party in general [7].

To boot, the Obama administration has permitted Islamists
to commit mass atrocities and gross human rights violations against non-Muslims
- and minority communities - in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Libya, and Egypt among other nations [8]. It can
also be summed up that the Obama administration has eroded American Exceptionalism,
irreparably damaged its global dominance, and also ruined global security. This
has accelerated the decay of the present global order. These lessons have not
been lost to Islamists, and most of them agree that the continuation of
Democrat-led administration serves their interests, as such an administration
not only weakens the U.S, but it also erodes the national values of the
American people. Correspondingly, this mollifies the fighting spirit - and resilience
- of the American people to deal with global jihad.

In his masterpiece, The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Edward Gibbon saliently notes that a
leader of inferior dignity normally staffs critical administrative positions
with unqualified (inferior) persons, who also tend to exhibit voracious
insolence. Consequently, this jeopardizes the management of national assets,
and eventually drives an empire to ruin. The US is headed in this direction
under the Obama Administration, even though the TEA (Tax Enough Already) party
movement and Republican activism have tried to stymie the decline.

Historical Antecedents

Even so, why did the U.S tolerate the formation
and maturation of armed Islamist groups? The answer to this question lies in
the geopolitical maneuvers the U.S conducted in Central Asia in the early 1990s.
Following the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the US did use
Islamists in Central Asia as armed proxies to forestall the resurgence of post-communist
Russia. For this reason, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were tolerated by the US, but
only for the time being [9]. Jamal Hamdan argued
that the fall of the Soviet Union prematurely elevated the US to the position
of sole superpower at a time when the US was unable to unilaterally maintain a
new global order [10]. This compelled the U.S to
use proxies to undermine its rivals across the globe - with Islamists serving
as the proxy counter-weight to Russia's reassertion of dominance across Central
Asia. Similarly, Abu al-Fadl - one of Al-Qaeda’s foremost strategists - noted
that the Democrats tended to favor policies which degraded the ability of the
US to unilaterally maintain global order, while the Republicans favored
conservatism and reassertion of American might as the sole unilateral global
power. Thus, according to al-Fadl, Islamists are best able to achieve their
goals when the democrats are in power. This was validated in 1993 when Bill
Clinton - a democrat - assumed power in the US, and Al-Qaeda used his first
term to expand across the globe, and in the process, morph into a multinational
terror organization. Its global reach was evident in 1998 when Al-Qaeda was
able to bomb the U.S Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. In 2000, Al-Qaeda
attacked
and decommissioned a naval guided
missile destroyer, USS Cole, which had
harbored in the port of Aden for refueling. These attacks never attracted
large-scale retaliatory attacks from the Democrat administration. To epitomize
its global reach and ability to strike the American homeland, Al-Qaeda carried
out the September 11 attacks. The Bush Administration retaliated by toppling
the Taliban Administration in Afghanistan, and forcing Al-Qaeda’s leaders to be
on the run. The Bush Administration also used the momentum of the global war on
Islamic terrorism to topple and dismantle another vexing autocratic regime, the
Ba’ath regime in Iraq.

Abu al-Fadl - along with Abu Musab al-Suri – quickly
noted the resolve of Republicans to combat Islamic Terrorism, and they astutely
entreated Islamists to bid their time till a favorable regime in the US came to
power post 9/11[11]. Some Islamists bade their time
until the Obama administration came to power, before striking with ruthless
efficiency, and in the process gained surmountable capabilities - eventually
gaining territories in Asia and Africa. Thus, jihadi strategists have pinned
some of theirs strategies on exploiting the fated policies of Democrat-led administrations.

Democrats and Jihadists
– The Enemy Within

If another Democrat is elected as US president,
the decline of the U.S. - and the West in general - will be accelerated. Under
the Obama administration, the US has pursued tragic economic, military, and
foreign policies that have ruined the US economy and degraded its military
potential, as well as mortified its ideological appeal across the world [12]. Continuation of Democratic Party rule in the US
would definitely damage the world, even though this coincides with the
strategic outlook of Islamists.

The majority of supporters of the Obama
administration in the US are leftists, vocal ethnic activists, atheists, LGBT,
and other persons who subscribe to devious ideologies, including Islamism [13]. Most of Obama supporters harbor illogical grievances
against the US as a nation, and as such, they are most likely to injure its
national interests – and they thus serve as the enemy within.

Promoting Jihad among
Black-Americans

It is widely acknowledged that violent Jihad
appeals to intellectually-feeble individuals who tend to lack appropriate critical
analysis skills [14]. This applies to the
African-American community, in which a segment of Black-Americans have been
enamored by the criminal ideologies promoted by ex-criminals such as Malcolm X,
and the violence-prone Nation of Islam [15]. For
this segment of the population, violence is glorified, and they can be
convinced by Islamists to attack fellow Americans. Still, there’s need to acknowledge
that there are prudent Black-Americans who understand that their
collective fate is tied to the national trajectory of the US, and most of them,
including the renowned neurosurgeon, Ben Carson, have joined fellow Americans
in strengthening the US by making the right choices [16].

Even so, Al-Shabaab has identified an
exploitable mass within the US who can become a fifth column. Taking advantage
of their numbed capabilities to critically analyze the message being conveyed
by Islamists, Al-Shabaab aims to recruit irrational Black-Americans into its
cause of global jihad, and this is the main aim of the propaganda video, The
Path to Paradise 2.

Media Manipulation

One of the principal elements of 4GW is the utilization
of sophisticated psychological warfare techniques, mostly through media
manipulation, to achieve maximum publicity using non-linear response
propagation [17]. Non-linear response propagation
basically means that a small perturbation in the discourse of a narrative
causes large disproportionate responses. In the video, the small perturbation was
the inclusion of a segment of Trump’s speech, and its juxtaposition alongside
the words of slain Al-Qaeda cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki; and the large
disproportionate response is exemplified by the wide publicity given to this
segment of the film by all international media outlets [18],
especially American mainstream media, with most liberal media outlets echoing
HSM’s message [19]. This allowed Al-Shabaab to
gain media prominence. Nonetheless, some media outlets recognized the stealth
nature of the message, withBreitbart News openly questioning why
Hillary Clinton employed Al-Shabaab’s narrative during her political tussle
with Donald Trump [20]. Whether intentional or
not, Al-Shabaab has been able to manipulate the international media to advance
its cause, as well as propagate its message to a global audience.

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